Hello,
everyone! I hope that you are saving enough energy for one of the most emotive
moments of the year: Christmas, which we will be celebrating next week. In the
Catholic world, each family and each culture has its own way of experiencing
the symbolic birth of Jesus Christ to redeem the Humanity from sin. But do we
know what the origins of Christmas are? And, which is more important, who is
Santa Claus and why does he show such a big generosity in bringing presents to
kids around the World? Let’s explore the sense and the evolution of this
celebration. Will you join me?

In
Ancient times the winter solstice was a crucial moment for every human
community after the invention of agriculture and cattle rising: during the
autumn, darkness had conquered daily life, shortening the hours of insolation
and condemning the people to a season of terror, when they lived in permanent
fear of being attacked by bad spirits and of not seeing the light again. As a
result of increasing darkness, harvest could not go on either, so the whole
community had to live on its savings, hoping that the gods were beneficent enough
as to allow them to grow food again within the next weeks. December 21st
marked the moment when their good hopes came true: once more, darkness would
give way to sunlight, which would re-conquer its territory little by little,
letting people undertake their rural occupations again until spring rewarded
them for their efforts, with natural species came back to life in a whole
explosion of colours. That is why the Romans institutionalised the celebration
of the winter solstice as the Saturnalia,
in order to honour Saturn, god of agriculture, between December 17th
and 23rd. When Christianity became official in the Roman Empire, by the
end of the 4th century A.D., priests and other religious authorities
thought it convenient to make Jesus’ birthdate coincide with that of the
Saturnalia, which was already so popular, to make it easier for the new
religion to win support among Roman people. Only they moved it a few days
forward, from December 21st to the 24th.

And
what about Santa Claus? In him two different traditions merge: on the one hand,
that of Teutonic god Odin, who was believed to give presents to children; on
the other hand, that of Saint Nicolas of Bari, archbishop of Myra (in Turkey)
in the 4th century A.D., who assisted a father that had not enough
money to marry his three daughters by giving the latter a vast amount of golden
coins, which he put into the sockets that the girls had hung out on the window
of their house. As centuries passed by,
the man who had been so benevolent not only towards those three sisters, but
also to every children around him, was remembered every Christmas in the shape
of an elderly character, with white beard and moustache, always smiling, who
gave presents to children that had behaved properly along the year.

That
is how present-day Christmas celebrations took place, adding of course the most
important element: the familiar atmosphere that presides the dinner that we
share with our beloved, or the love and tenderness that we provide to people
that cannot spend the night with their relatives, but whom we try to make feel
like home. Because the ‘Christmas spirit’ must be present in our lives not only
in December, but also during the whole year. Don’t you agree?

When telling a story or describing
something, it’s quite common to have to talk about the number of people or
things at any place in time. In English
we have a rather precise way to do this, so today we’re going to shed some
light on this strange construction. The
sentence: “There were three of us,” means Éramos
tres and many Spanish speakers have the tendency to say, “We were
three”—but that’s incorrect!In
English, if we want to express the idea of how many people or things were at a
certain event/involved in a situation, we need to use:

·The verb there is/there are OR
it +to be (these can be conjugated in the past, present or future, depending on
the situation)

·The number of people or things

· "of"

·The accusative form of the
personal pronoun (us, you, them).
Remember, since we’re counting, we’re only going to be using plural
pronouns.

This little formula should be helpful but
let’s look at some examples to make sure it’s clear.

How many books were there in your bag?

There were four of them.

How many students are there in your class?

There are 31 of us.

How many of us are going to participate in
the concert?

I’m not; I think it will be just the two of
you.

Obviously you could respond to these questions
in other ways: “There were four books in your bag”; “there are 31 students in
my class”; or “only you two will participate in the concert”. However, this construction is a great way to
show your domination of one of the intricacies of the English language, so try
it out!

Here are a few examples to practice on
(feel free to make up the answers):

Fortunately or unfortunately, we have to admit that time rules our life. We’re constantly scheduling things, marking our calendars, making sure we leave on time to get to the next activity—let’s face it, we’re slaves to the clock! And so, you can move to a nice a little cabin in the woods and use the sun as your only form to measure time or you can accept your fate and learn how to talk about time terms in English. Sorry guys, today we’ll have to go with the latter.

Believe it or not, we all choose our words
carefully. We speak differently when we
speak to our bosses, our mothers and our friends. However, when speaking a foreign language
sometimes it’s easy for these differences to get lost in translation and you
end up speaking to your boss as if he were your child. Worrisome or embarrassing at best, it’s
important to learn about register in English.
Here we’re going to give you some examples about how you can speak
formally and informally but it’s up to you to decide when to use each one.

1.Greetings.

A simple “Hello” is a
great go-to greeting for friends, family or colleagues. To be even a bit more formal, you can try
“Good morning,” “Good afternoon,” or “Good evening.”

When talking to your
friends you can sound more relaxed by saying “Hey there,” “Hi,” “What’s up?” or
“How’s it going?”

2.Making a request:

In Spanish, there’s a strong tendency to use the imperative form (“Dame el boli; Pásame ese papel”). However, in English we tend to form these
requests as questions using “can” or “could”.

Now let’s look at a formal way to ask these same questions:

“I’m sorry to bother you but could you let me borrow your pen?”

“Would you mind passing me that paper over there?”

In informal requests we’re more
relaxed but the imperative still sounds quite demanding. Sometimes we emper it with a tag question:

“Can I borrow your pen?”

“Pass that paper, will you?”

3.Expressing emotion.

Giving positive feedback or congratulating someone is always
appreciated but it’s not really appropriate to say, “Cool!” or “Sweet!” to your
boss or professor.

You could say, “Wow, that’s great news.” Or “I’m really impressed,
that’s amazing.” Excellent, wonderful,
incredible and terrific are some other options.

To begin with, it will be very useful to comment some
idioms that may be tricky when you attend a job interview and also when you
elaborate your own résumé. It is important to notice that when Anglo-Saxon
people ask you about your career, they are not interested about your university
studies,

as we Spaniards might assume since the word is quite similar to our ‘carrera’, which we use to talk about our university degree. In
this sense, ‘career’ means your professional life and is therefore closely
linked to your experience, which you may want to describe backwards, that is,
beginning from your last position and going back to the previous ones only if
you are asked to. Once you have talked about your professional experience,
there are many chances that your interviewer(s) will ask you about your
university studies, in order to know whether your knowledge, together with your
experience, meets the requirements of the post to which you are applying. The
same as before, do start describing your last studies and go back to other
academic activities only if the interviewer(s) think it necessary, as most
times he/she will only need to know about your more recent achievements.

Another common mistake might be committed when you are
asked about your main virtues as a worker: in this case, you will be asked
about your ‘skills’ and you have also to talk about your ‘skills’ or
‘abilities’, never mention the word ‘qualifications’. Again, the Spanish term
used in this situation is ‘cualificación’, but its English translation means ‘the marks that you have obtained
during your studies’. Hence, there will be a huge difference between the topic
that you will be speaking of and the one that you were asked about if you make
this wrong translation. As you will surely have noticed, I am using different
words to refer to your potential new job, because all of them have the same
meaning: job, post or position, though the last two are related to relatively
complicated tasks that are carried out normally as a member of a public
institution or a private company, whereas ‘job’ means any professional activity
of which you make your living.

The same as before, there is a detail of your new
contract that you must never mistake: holidays. This expression is the one that
we translate in Spanish as ‘vacaciones’. Once more, there is an English idiom that can be used
as equivalent to that one: ‘vacation’. Only that the latter is more commonly
used to refer to a period of time in which you have not been working for other
reasons different from holidays, for instance a medical condition, a field
research leave, etc. And never forget that, if you wish to know any specific
details about your new occupation, you will never use the expression: ‘Which
tasks will I realise in the company?’ Here we are confronting another false
friend: ‘realise’, which is very similar to the Spanish word ‘realizar’ (meaning ‘to carry out / to do an activity’), in
English means ‘to suddenly become aware of something’. Therefore, the right
question will be: ‘Which tasks will I have to develop at my new post?’

Though it is not my intention to talk about false
friends, since Abigail Franckquepohl has already analysedthemin a previous article previously published in the blog , I have included a
table with the expressions that I have mentioned in these lines. People at ‘121
Conversation’ would also be very thankful if any of you wish to comment a situation
similar to the ones that have already been described in a job interview or in
any other context.

Hi
everyone; in this article I wish to share with you some thoughts about the
implications of today’s multicultural society in work environments, as well as in
the classroom. Maybe fifteen or twenty years ago, either in Spain or in any
other Western country, it was rather common to share the classroom and the working
space with people that had the same culture as us. There were only a few
countries with well-known imperial past that hosted some people from their
former colonies, but they were an exception and they used to regard immigrants
as second-class citizens. A radical shift in the situation occurred by the late
1990s and early 2000s, when economic prosperity and mass media spread the
Western way of life and turned the ‘civilised West’ into de destination of
hundreds of thousands of migrants that longed for a better living.

As
a result of the situation, we share our everyday spaces with people from
different cultural contexts and it is necessary to stress the importance of
tolerance and respect to make possible a comfortable work atmosphere, specially
in a moment of economic recession like the one we are living, in which
xenophobic proclaims that blame ‘the other’ for our own faults gain more and
more popular support. Either at the school, at the university, or at the
worksite, we must regard other cultures as experiences different from our own
that we have to know in order to enrich our knowledge of the world around us.
In our minds, ‘the other’ must always be an endless source of information about
how different peoples experience life in a broad sense: how they live
religiousness, what their values are, which their main celebrations and their
special rituals are, what their consideration towards the other is, etc. Getting
to know these aspects will not only help us understand everyone better, even
people from our same culture: it can even make us reconsider some aspects of
our lives and change certain elements of our cultural discourse to adapt them
to our daily life. In addition, it will enable us to use the proper expressions
when talking to other colleagues and to understand better what they imply when
they make suggestions or remarks, too: this is the main goal and the best
result of studying and using foreign languages in our job (or any other daily
routines) from a grammatical as well as from a cultural perspective. And that
is why nowadays a well-respected trend in teaching and learning foreign
languages is to frame them within the cultural background in which they were
produced.

In
the different scenarios that I have mentioned before there are always very good
chances to become interested about different cultural elements: religion,
celebrations and rituals, costumes... that become especially visible in certain
moments. For instance, if we are dealing with a Brazilian company we will need
of course to speak Portuguese, but we will also have to bear in mind that there
are significant differences between our concept of time and theirs, so if you
want something finished for ‘tomorrow’ you may want to clarify that you mean
‘the day after today’, not ‘a certain moment within the next few days’. Another
common situation occurs when we are sent to work in a foreign country, and we
receive lessons of its language but not of its work culture, that is: what
their daily timetable is, whether they respect punctuality or not, to what
degree they trust each person’s individual initiatives... And of course, it is
crucial to know about how people tend to salute each other in other cultures:
in Spain men usually shake hands, women kiss each other in both cheeks, and men
and women do the same between them, since shaking hands is regarded as extra
formal and rather cold. But... look out! French people always kiss each other
every time they meet again, whereas the British and the Germans tend to shake
hands, as do the Italians. As you can see, all the aforementioned aspects may escape
our thoughts, but they can easily lead to uncomfortable misunderstandings if they
are not taken into account, since they will condition our interaction with the
others.

The
ideal attitude towards different cultural manifestations is curiosity and
eagerness to learn, as well as to empathise with them and turn them into a part
of us when we need to use them in our job. Thus we will create an atmosphere of
tolerance and respect, and also of reciprocal influence that makes us mentally wealthier
and socially wiser. And that is the main reason why we must transmit these
values to our children, so they become rooted in everyone’s minds from an early
stage of their lives. One may argue that sometimes we confront intolerance when
trying to know ‘the other’, but if we persevere and at the same time we show a
good disposition to share our own cultural discourse, resistance will undoubtedly
give way to a more welcoming attitude to dialogue and to making a multicultural
society possible.

Hi
everyone!!! Two weeks ago we explored the origin and the meaning of Halloween,
making it clear that it was born among pagan communities in Ancient Times as a
tradition to celebrate the end of harvest, as well as to frighten bad spirits
and warn them to leave the community alone during the harsh winter. So now it
is time to learn about another Anglo-Saxon celebration that will take place
within the next few days: Thanksgiving. The funny thing is that Thanksgiving was
born with the same spirit.

In
the 16th century King Henry 8th of England, who had just made himself head of
his own Church, departing from the large embrace of Catholicism, decided to
create a celebration that would serve three purposes: first, it would be a more
familiar way than Halloween to give thanks for the prosperous harvest,
gathering all the families together by the warmth of fuming chimneys in order
to share a delicious and loving dinner; second, Thanksgiving would equalise the
amount of holidays in the Anglican and the Catholic calendar; finally, the new
holiday would evidence the power of the English King at the head of the
Anglican church against the Roman Pope, its main antagonist in the European continent
shaken by the spirit of the Council of Trent.

As
it often happens with the institutionalisation of every celebration,
doubtlessly Thanksgiving soon overcame the British Crown’s expectations and it
became so popular that the Pilgrims that fled Great Britain in the 1620s and
the 1630s brought the tradition with them to North America. There are different
opinions on when the first Thanksgiving was celebrated in the British colonies
that later became the United States of America, though everyone may have seen
the typical image of a Pilgrim family sharing their food with the American
Indians in Plymouth by 1621. But leaving such irrelevant details apart, the
most important thing about Thanksgiving is that it has become a familiar event
in every house in the Anglo-Saxon world, regardless of each one’s beliefs,
since it is now considered as an excuse to share time with relatives and
friends and enjoy some intimate moments before going back to the stress of
everyday.

With
your permission I will tell my personal story concerning Thanksgiving. I must
confess that in my youth I had always approached it with some prejudice, as I
was not really aware of its meaning and I was afraid that it is another pretext
to make us spend our money. However, when I was in London four years ago I had
the chance to celebrate it at the house of the family with which I was living.
It was a rather humble and discreet celebration, but it was enough to make me
conceive good feelings towards it. One year later I was living in New York and
my landlady, a loving Colombian woman, took me to her brother’s place to share
thanksgiving with a representation of the Colombian community in the state of
New Jersey. As you can guess, the new experience was radically different from
the previous one, but even so it made me learn to appreciate more and more the
affective element of that day. Finally, when one year later I celebrated it in
Pittsburgh with many Spaniards that had gone there to work, the same as me, I
had already fallen in love with Thanksgiving: it has always given me the chance
to feel like home every time that I have been abroad. I hope everyone will find
the same meaning in it, and I wish you a happy Thanksgiving.

Isn’t that the worst feeling when one of
your friends disappoints you? Or even
worse, when they betray you? It’s like you’re stabbed right through the
heart. Well, words are the same,
although hopefully it doesn’t hurt quite so much. False cognates, more colloquially known as
“false friends,” are words in two languages that look the same but don’t have
the same meaning. They can really deceive you, those little tricksters.

Some words in
English and Spanish are spelled exactly the same way and have the same meaning,
take chocolate--the only difference is the pronunciation. Animal, legal, taxi,
video and sofa are some more examples.
Other words look very similar and have the same meaning like
apartment-apartamento, contact-contacto, elegant-elegante, dialogue-diálogo,
band-banda and many more. However, those
aren’t the crux

of our problem. What
we’re going to focus on today are words that look the same but have totally
different meanings—the false cognates or infamous “false friends.” Here are 15
of the most common false friend mistakes for Spanish speakers.

Spanish
term

English
definition

English
false friend

Spanish
translation

Actual

Current

Actual

Real, existente

Asistir

Attend

Assist

ayudar

Carpeta

Folder

Carpet

alfombra

Constipación

A cold, stuffed up

Constipation

Estreñimiento

Decepción

Disappointment

Deception

Engaño

Éxito

Success

Exit

Salida

Embarazado

Pregnant

Embarassed

Avergonzada

Fábrica

Factory

Fabric

Tela, tejido

Idioma

Language

Idiom

Modismo, frase hecha

Noticia

News

Notice

Aviso/Notar

Remover

Stir

Remove

Quitar, sacar

Reunión

Meeting

Reunion

Reencuentro/Reunión

Sensible

Sensitive

Sensible

Sensato

Sopa

Soup

Soap

Jabón

Soportar

To put up with

Support

Apoyar

Here
are some examples of these false friends in use-hopefully they help you
remember the difference.

1. I eat carrot soup everyday but I wash
myself with soap.

2. I stuffed my papers in my folder and put
it down on the carpet.

3. Actually, I’m really interested in
current events.

4. I was so embarrassed that I asked that a
woman if she were pregnant-it turns out she was just fat!

5. What a beautiful fabric! Yes, it was
made in a factory.

Homework!

Now it’s your turn. Watch out because these are difficult. Each
sentence contains a false friend error. Try to spot the false friend and
replace it with the correct word in English.

It’s been a week now since we started to see a very peculiar decoration in every shop window: some smiling diabolic cabbages seeming to say ‘hello!’ to passers by, ‘get ready for Halloween!’ That’s right: Halloween is approaching, and in some days many people will wear terrific costumes to attend massive parties or just to celebrate the special occasion with friends. In the last two decades the Spaniards have incorporated the tradition of Halloween, as a way of showing our immersion into the global Anglo-Saxon culture, but do we really know what Halloween means and which its origins are? Let’s investigate about it!Two thousand years ago, while the Romans were trying to control Europe, members of the Celt tribes that resisted Roman domination to the North of present-day France and in the British Islands gathered every late October to celebrate the end of harvest. Apparently the celebration was supposed to be a big one, as another year had gone by without great problem and the gods had favoured their worshippers with enough food to go trough a harsh winter. However, Celts knew that the end of harvest was also the beginning of dark times, when the sun would go down shortly after midday, leaving the people to their own luck and, of course, exposed to the threat of bad spirits, who would feel rather comfortable in an isolated land abandoned by the sunlight. Suddenly they had an outstanding idea: what if they dressed up as bad spirits? What if they walked around disguised as terrific creatures of which the bad spirits themselves would be terrified? Thus the commemoration of Samhain, or the end of harvest, became also a means of terrifying the devil and making sure that the whole community passed the winter unthreatened by it. ﻿

Picture taken by Antonio J. Pinto in Hoboken, New Jersey. Halloween, 2010

The Celts could not imagine that they had just invented Halloween, though some centuries had still to pass by before the contemporary celebration took shape. First, the Romans adopted it once they had already taken control of the whole continent, and they too celebrated the end of harvest and of summer in a very similar way, in order to honour Pomosa, the holy goddess of harvest whose symbol was a poma, that is, an apple. By the end of the 5th Century Catholicism became official within the Roman Empire and maintained the tradition, only that three centuries later popes Gregory 3rd and Gregory 4th made some changes in it: on the one hand, they decided to turn it into a celebration in daytime, as Catholicism tended to associate sin to everything that happened after sunset; on the other hand, they decided to make it a remembrance of the souls of the dead and to empty it of its pagan meaning. Hence they called it ‘All Hallows’ Eve’, which contracted became ‘Halloween’. ﻿﻿In the same places where the Celts had lived hundreds of years before, Catholic communities started to honour the souls of their deceased relatives or friends, but they also preserved the tradition of wearing terrifying customs, only then it was just a way of having fun and losing one’s inhibition behind the mask of anonymousness. European Anglo-Saxon migrants that crossed the Atlantic and colonised America took the tradition with them and strengthened it, especially in a new land where they felt a special necessity to conjure the threat of the devil and the unknown, as well as to demand protection and good luck by thanking God for the recent and prosperous harvest. That was why Halloween became so popular in the United States, where it turned into a major celebration in the 1920s, when everyone wished to let the world know about the benefits of the American Way of Life.At present, Halloween has become a major occasion to meet with friends, have a nice time and, just for one night, forget about everyday life and lose the fear of making a fool of oneself. Therefore, it is another way of bringing a smile to your own face and, by that, to the faces of all the people that share the moment with you. This is one of the main reasons why it has become so popular in Spain and in other non-Anglo-Saxon countries that have incorporated it to their popular culture, where people pretend to terrify the others in the evening just to wake up the next day with the sweet taste of candy on their lips. Happy Halloween!!!Before finishing the article, let me ask you some questions: Were you aware of the origins of Halloween? Do you celebrate Halloween? If so, how do you do it? If you have children, do you encourage them to wear dresses and go door after door asking ‘trick or treat’? What do you think of incorporating this tradition to the Spanish popular culture? What other ways do you think we might promote to celebrate Halloween? (Add your comments below)